the Ripening: Notes/Quotes

Showing posts with label Notes/Quotes. Show all posts

Notes & Quotes: HumanKind by Brad Aronson

The following are my favorite quotes from Brad Aronson's HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time.

The heroes in HumanKind don't command an army of helpers or have an abundance of free time. They're everyday people who focus on what they can do to make a difference. Their acts of kindness change lives and even save them. These everyday heroes don't just hope the world will get better--they make it better.
Yes, it can be paralyzing to thing about the level of need out there, but if we do what we can, that will be enough. No expression of love is wasted, and even the smallest gestures tend to go much further than we think they will.
You never know which "drop in the bucket" will spark a movement, and you don't want to cheat the world out of that. But it's important to act regardless of the scope of the outcome. Even if an act of kindness helps just a single person for a single day, that's a gift.
Life is a series of single days. If we make up our minds to help each other through these days, before we know it we'll be getting by. Of the many forms that love takes, maybe the most obvious one is a simple decision: a decision to put in the effort to make someone's life easier or more rewarding, even if just for a day. A commitment to doing more than hoping for the best for each other.
Here are a few takeaway ideas that have helped me to become a better person and made me more likely to make a difference through my daily interactions:

Be aware.
Make better decisions.
Make people believe you can levitate a table.
Tell the truth.
Wave.
Be sensitive to limitations.

People talk about big birthday surprises and breathtaking holiday gifts, but give me the little things in life. To me, it's the everyday details that matter. The little things are the big things. When we realize this, we also realize that there are infinite ways to help others.
If something doesn't sound like a big deal, think again. Take a moment to consider that it might be a big deal after all--and to remember that we need to get past drop-in-the-bucket thinking if we're going to see all the opportunities out there for what they are.
Everyone wants to be heard, but it's rare that we're fully heard. Here's a way to truly listen: Wait three to five seconds to see if someone is finished speaking before you respond. Waiting those few seconds is hard, but it will completely change how you listen and eliminate unintentional interruptions. It's a gift you can give to anyone, and it literally only costs seconds.
In most cases, it's good to avoid giving advice unless you're asked. When you're giving advise, you're not spending that time listening to how the other person feels.
Instead of saying, "Can I visit an see if I can help with anything?" I can say, "Can I come see you?" Instead of "Do you need me to come to the hospital with you?" I can say, "Can I come to the hospital with you?" Sometimes it's hard to accept help, but we can make it easier by not calling it that.
There's no lack of opportunity for any of us to do good in the world. And there's no lack of incentive. When we improve others' lives, we raise the quality of life for the whole community.
Why not think bigger than our daily routines and crossing items off our to-do lists? Each of us has the power to "be awesome" every day. If you say to yourself, "I'm going to make someone's world better today," it will happen. All it takes is looking for opportunity, following through and that resource we all have within us: love.

Notes & Quotes: Nobody Is Coming to Save You by Lt. Col. Scott Mann

The following are my favorite quotes from Lt. Col. Scott Mann's Nobody Is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret's Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done.

Ultimately, this is how we get big shit done: by being able to relate to the pain of others, and by being more relevant to their goals.
Humans are ancient creatures who seek Meaning, are primarily Emotional, are definitely Social, and are all Storytellers who constantly Struggle.
True leaders serve not only the people around them, but also the people who come long after they're gone.
If you're already working on a legacy, then you'll know. But if you aren't, as is more likely the case, don't fret. Grab a pen and some paper, find a quiet place, and write for seven minutes about the legacy you'd like to leave. A hidden gem will reveal itself, even if it's barely twinkling.
Clean your side of the street. In all likelihood, and I mean nobody, is going to make you get clear. That's your personal responsibility.
My dad always said, "If you want to get back to human nature, get back to nature."
There is a spiritual component to getting outside. The natural world has the power to shatter our fear-based, trance state and restore our sense of meaning and our connections, not just between ourselves and our environment, but between one another. We must give these actions the intentional respect they deserve.
According to the psychiatrist and educator Ivan Tyrrell, "Movement and meaning are inextricably linked." In fact, he says, "A truly spiritual person is not a hermit sitting on a mountain contemplating his navel, but someone involved in the world, working, serving others and opposing tyranny of all kinds."
Making a human connection and gaining initial rapport is essential before commencing with your agenda. Asking thoughtful, open-ended questions that allow the other party to respond in narrative. Striving to see the pictures in their head that drive their goals and illuminate their pain. Engaging with an intention of pure curiosity and discovery. Preparing your body through breathwork for being relatable and relevant before the next tense presentation to your boss begins. These simple moves exponentially reduce the emotional temperature in the room.
Logic doesn't move people. Emotions do.
The secret to a successful interaction, no matter if it's with a total stranger or the president of the United States, is to show up with an intention 100 percent built around discovery.
Stories provide meaning, context, emotional connection, and are remembered for a long time.
Beware of the desire to prejudge of self-edit your story when bringing it into the world. Stay the course. Fight for it. It literally has the potential to change someone's life--including your own.
There is another universal lesson for storytelling that you can take from these rough places: It's not always the stories we tell that change hearts and minds...It's the stories we ask to hear.
"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." Joseph Campbell
The leaders I found to be the most authentic and worthy of personal sacrifice were those who were willing to admit when they had gaps in knowledge or needed advice.

Notes & Quotes: The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann

The following are my favorite quotes from Bob Burg and John David Mann's The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea.

Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated.
Appearances can be deceiving. Truth is, they nearly always are.
The Golden Rule of Business. All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people they know, like and trust.
Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.
You give, give, give. Why? Because you love to. It's not a strategy, it's a way of life. And when you do, then very, very profitable things begin to happen.
Your compensation is directly proportional to how many lives you touch.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Everybody can be great because anybody can serve."
Sometimes you feel foolish, even look foolish, but you do the thing anyway.
Survive, save, and serve. They are the three universal reasons for working. Survive--to meet your basic living needs. Save--to go beyond your basic needs and expand your life. And serve--to make a contribution to the world around you.
Always look for the solution where you both come out ahead.
When you base your relationships--in business or anywhere else in your life--on who owes you what, that's not being a friend. That's being a creditor.
If you place the other person's interests first, your interests will always be taken care of. Always. Some people call it enlightened self-interest. Watch out for what other people need, with the faith that when you do, you'll get what you need.
Givers attract.
Remember this: no matter what your training, no matter what your skills, no matter what area you're in, you are your most important commodity. The most valuable gift you have to offer is you.
The Five Laws:

The Law of Value. Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.
The Law of Compensation. Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.
The Law of Influence. Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people's interests first.
The Law of Authenticity. The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.
The Law of Receptivity. The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.

Notes & Quotes: The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos R.N.

The following are my favorite quotes from Hadley Vlahos's (R.N) The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments.

I made a note to myself that if I were in a position like this in the future, I would instead explain what I going to do and why, and assure the patient that I would finish as quickly as possible.
I reminded myself to live for today, not the fears of tomorrow--a promise I had made to myself when I started working in hospice.
The voice of one of my favorite nursing school instructors popped into my head: Meet them where they are.
"The surge of energy almost everyone gets before dying," he said, as if this was a well-known medical fact. I now know that the surge is a common occurrence. Often, loved ones who witness it think that the patient is somehow miraculously in the process of recovering. But to those in the know, it's a sign that death is imminent and will likely occur within the next few days.
Maybe sometimes people didn't need more--maybe, sometimes, they needed...less. Maybe sometimes all they needed was a bit of comfort.
I started thinking differently about patient care. I started to reframe my work with the understanding that something doing "nothing" (as I would have thought of it in nursing school and my previous jobs) was doing something. It was being there, offering comfort and solidarity--and that mattered. A lot.
While I was never trained for it in nursing school, I knew that watering Sue's plants, making her sandwiches, helping her use the internet, and mailing letters for her were just as important as any other work I've done.
When the time comes, we all want the same things: care, comfort, and connection.
I am continually amazed at how life just continues on as usual, despite the tragedy that exists all around us.
One of the more stunning and beautiful things I've witnessed as a hospice nurse is the way in which people choose their time of death. So many of us can't choose when we go to sleep at night, and yet we seem to have some control over when we die. I've had some patients intent on dying alone, stealing away in the matter of seconds they're left to themselves while a loved one goes to the bathroom, and others, like Sandra, who hang on until the moment when a loved one reaches their side.
Professor Lopez was one of those people who really saw me, who believed in my worth, and who made a difference. It's amazing how even those people who are in our life for just a short time can make a lasting impact.
Although it's hard to explain, this shift is one that every hospice nurse and person who has witnessed a death has experienced--the tangible shift in the air in that moment when a person leaves their body. It's not unlike when you walk into a room expecting someone to be there, only to discover you're alone. Sometimes that shift is more pronounced than others, and sometimes this moment occurs before their physical death, while other times it's after.
I'm often asked what I believe in. As you've read, it's been a journey. I have cared for enough end-of-life patients with varying religious backgrounds to believe that how you live your life is more important than what you believe in.

Notes & Quotes: Change Your Paradigm, Change Your Life by Bob Proctor

The following are my favorite quotes from Bob Proctor's Change Your Paradigm, Change Your Life:

A paradigm is a mental program situated in your subconscious that has almost exclusive control over all your habitual behavior--and almost all of your behavior is habitual.
There's no point in telling people to do something if you're not doing it yourself.
When you read a good book through the second time, you don't see something in that book that wasn't there before; you see something in yourself that wasn't there before.
So it is with the subconscious mind. Whatever you plant will grow. Like the earth, the subconscious doesn't determine good or bad; it just accepts and grows it.
The only prerequisite when you're making a decision is, do you want to?
We have to paint the picture of the good that we desire and write it down. When you have created an image in your conscious mind, you impress it on the subconscious mind through repetition, and you let yourself feel it. It's got to be real.
There's a basic law of life that says, create or disintegrate. If you're not going ahead, you're going backwards. When you violate the law, that's the sin. You go backwards, you're working against it; you're trying to force things. When you're working with the law, you go ahead. When you're doing it right, everything flows beautifully. If you have to really struggle, you're probably going against the law.
Science-fiction author Robert A Heinlein once observed, "In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until we ultimately become enslaved by it."
People that are continually studying are going to be happy, healthy, and wealthy. Actually, there is no such thing as a learned person. You're either learning or you're not.
What you think of yourself is very important. What other people think of you is not important.
Earl Nightingale's definition of success is the best I've ever heard: "Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal." An ideal is an idea that you've fallen in love with. You are progressively becoming aware as you're moving towards the good you desire.
The basic law of life is, create or disintegrate. If you're working toward a predetermined goal, you're creating; you're doing what God meant you to do.
Results are nothing but the manifestation of your actions.
If you have not found your purpose, I would recommend setting aside ten to fifteen minutes every morning. Put a pen and pad someplace where you can sit quietly. If you drink coffee, make yourself a cup, go to your spot, sit there, and ask, "What do I love doing?"
The income you earn is in direct ratio to the need for what you do, your ability to do it, and the difficulty of replacing you. There's got to be a tremendous need for what you're doing, so you're going to get really good at it, and you're going to be really difficult to replace.
When you're reacting, everything outside of you is in control of you; you're not in control of yourself at all.
Here are some basic, simple rules: if you follow them, you win; if you violate them, you lose. There are three things that a person absolutely must lock into if the really want to set a higher goal and go after it. The first is decision. The second is understanding visualization, and the third is discipline.
Take responsibility for how you feel and act. Energy is flowing through us, and it's up to us to direct it in any way we want.
I take what I do and work to get better at it every day. Get better at what you're good at, manage what you're not good at, and be accountable to someone. Make sure that when you say you're going to do something, it's going to get done.
Comfort is not a good place to be. If you're really comfortable with everything in your life, you're stuck, you're going sideways, you're not growing at all. You've got to be doing something that causes a respectable amount of discomfort and keep doing it until you're comfortable with it. When you are, then set another target that causes discomfort. That discomfort indicates that you're growing; you're going where you've never been.
Harvest the good. There's good in everything. The more you look for, the more you'll find.
You are the only problem you will ever have, and you are the only solution. When you understand that, you'll start to see the value in sitting down and becoming grateful every day when you're having a bit of a problem. It's such a phenomenal attitude, and it changes your life.
It's up to us to recognize what beliefs we are operating with that are false and get rid of them. That's really the trick of life.
I'm of the opinion that if you're struggling, you're doing it wrong. If you're working in harmony with the law, it's going to be a free flow.
Money is not going to make you a better person, but it will make you more of what you already are. If you're not a nice person, you're going to become despicable. If you are a nice person, you will become much nicer. Money's a magnifier. There's no limit to what you can earn, but to earn it, you have to provide service. That doesn't mean you have to work, but you have to provide service.
Never let anybody decide what you're going to earn. That's something you've got to decide. If you're letting somebody else decide, and you're not happy with it, you know what you have to do: you have to get out of there and go out on your own.
Anyone who wants anything they haven't got should write down what they want in the present tense. It doesn't matter if they think it's silly. They should start reading it and speaking it out loud over and over again. Something will start to happen first in their mind, and then in the outside world--inside out.
When you sit down and think of what you want, you let your imagination go. If you can see it, write it down. Don't talk to anybody else, but me about it. Because everybody else will laugh at you, and you don't need that happening. Don't mix with people who haven't got big goals.
Eight Principles for Living:

Develop an awareness of your infinite potential.
Act on what you want.
Make a decision.
Total commitment.
Accountability.
Focus.
Discipline.
Visioneering.

Earl Nightingale used to say that if you do something for ninety days, you'll probably do it for the rest of your life.

Notes & Quotes: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

The following are my favorite quotes from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans's Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.

A well-designed life is a life that is generative--it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always a possibility of surprise.
Designers love questions, but what they really love is reframing questions.
Your life is not a thing, it's an experience; the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.
The reframe for the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" is this: "Who or what do you want to grow into?"
Radical collaboration works on the principle that people with very different backgrounds will bring their idiosyncratic technical and human experiences to the team. This increases the chance that the team will have empathy for those who will use what they are designing, and that the collision of different backgrounds will generate truly unique solutions.
A well-designed life is not a life of drudgery. You weren't put on this earth to work eight hours a day at a job you hate until the time comes to die.
The five mind-sets you are going to learn in order to design your life are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration. These are you design tools, and with them you can build anything, including a life you love.
Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.
Passion is the result of good life design, not the cause.
Problem Finding + Problem Sovling = Well-Designed Life.
Our problems become our story, and we can all get stuck in our stories.
In life design, if it's not actionable, it's not a problem.
Here's a little tidbit that is going to save you a lot of time--months, years, decades even. It has to do with reality. People fight reality. They fight it tooth and nail, with everything they've got. And anytime you are arguing or fighting with reality, reality will win. You can't outsmart it. You can't trick it. You can't bend it to your will. Not now. Not ever.
If you're beginning to think like a designer, you will recognize that life is never done. Work is never done. Play is never done. Love and health are never done. We are only done designing our lives when we die.
Our goal for your life is rather simple: coherency. A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: Who you are. What you believe. What you are doing.
Living coherently doesn't mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way.
People in flow report the experience as having these sorts of attributes: Experiencing complete involvement in the activity. Feeling a sense of ecstasy or euphoria. Having great inner clarity--knowing just what to do and how to do it. Being totally calm and at peace. Feeling as if time were standing still--or disappearing in an instant.
Life design is about getting more out of your current life--and not only about redesigning a whole new life.
Drill down into the particulars of your day and catch yourself in the act of having a good time.
As a life designer, you need to embrace two philosophies:

You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from.
You never choose your first solution to any problem.

Don't make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn't working. Reframe the solution to some other possibilities, prototype those ideas (take some test hikes), and get yourself unstuck. Anchor problems keep us stuck because we can only see one solution--the one we already have that doesn't work.
If your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. Designers have known this all along--you don't want to start with just one idea, or you're likely to get stuck with it.
Life is an odyssey--and adventurous journey into the future with hopes and goals, helpers, lovers and antagonists, unknowns and serendipities, all unfolding over time in a way we both intend at the start and weave together as we go.
We prototype to ask good questions, create experiences, reveal our assumptions, fail fast, fail forward, sneak up on the future, and build empathy for ourselves and others. Once you accept that this is really the only way to get the data you need, prototyping becomes an integral part of your life design process.
The Rules of Brainstorming

Go for quantity, not quality.
Defer judgment and do not censor ideas.
Build off the ideas of others.
Encourage wild ideas.

When you really get the hang of the design thinking approach, you end up thinking differently about everything.
Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not an outcome. If you can get that, you've got it all.
Everyone participating in your life design effort in one way or another should be thought of as being a part of your team, but there are different roles to be played, and it's useful to name them.

Supporters
Players
Intimates
The Team

What does a well-designed and balanced life look like? Imagine a day cut into perfectly equal pieces of pie--one slice for career, one slice for play and fun, one slice for family and friends, one slice for health. What is your perfect pie?

Notes & Quotes: The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

The following are my favorite quotes from John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet.

My brother, Hank, who started out his professional life as a biochemist, once explained it to me like this: As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.
I reread the work of my friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who'd died a few months earlier. She'd once written, "For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: Pay attention to what you pay attention to. That's pretty much all the info you need."
I'm reminded of something my religion professor Donald Rogan told me once: "Never predict the end of the world. You're almost certain to be wrong, and if you're right, no one will be around to congratulate you."
With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.
Like most other energy-intensive innovations, AC primarily benefits people in rich communities, while the consequences of climate change are borne disproportionately by people in impoverished communities.
After the journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, "To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd." But it's not absurd. What's absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.
When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you're just kidding. It's so easy to take refuge in the "just" of just kidding. It's just a joke. We're just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.
We live in hope--that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we're here because we're here because we're here.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that one of the flaws in the human character "is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
More land more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined.
As the legendary driver Mario Andretti put it, "if everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you're observing the traditions with now, but also all those who've ever observed them.
One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.
On the other side of monotony lies a flow state, a way of being that is just being, a present tense that actually feels present.
When I was a kid, I thought being a parent meant knowing what to say and how to say it. But I have no idea what to say or how to say it. All I can do is shut up and listen. Otherwise, you miss all the good stuff.
Cholera continues to spread and kill not because we lack the tools to understand or treat the disease as we did two hundred years ago, but because each day, as a human community, we decide not to prioritize the health of people living in poverty.
Almost everything turns out to be interesting if you pay the right kind of attention to it.
I've spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my solar plexus that my life isn't for anything, that it doesn't mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of the gingko tree, I'm able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here--that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know.

Notes & Quotes: Gambler by Billy Walters

The following are my favorite quotes from Billy Walters's Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk:

My philosophy on life is simple: You come into this world with nothing, and you leave with nothing. So seize every opportunity to leave a legacy that might inspire others to make the most of their time on earth. At the end of the day, there are two people you can't bullshit--yourself and your maker. You will be judged by the way you've lived and by whether you've followed your servant's heart.
I had no battle plan, other than a determination to prove my worth to anyone who figured me a failure based on my clothes or country accent. My answer to the doubters and bullies was to get up every morning, throw the blinders on, and charge like Billy the bull. Head down, horns up, taking on the world, willing to go as hard and as far as needed to defend my dignity.
Gambling was simply a way of life in Kentucky. My friends bet on a daily basis as naturally as they ate supper. We played cards, shot pool, pitched pennies, shot dice, and wagered on racehorses and sports. Basically, we'd bet on anything that moved. We never gave a thought to gambling being immoral or illegal.
I learned early on that the auto business was different from factory work because of all the downtime. The secret to success in car sales was to stay busy 100 percent of the time. If there weren't potential buyers milling around, the other salesmen would goof off in the office by chewing the fat, playing cards, or reading magazines. I also learned something that would become a hallmark of my business career--the more information you accumulate, the more opportunities you create.
When matching up, my game plan was simple: one way or another I needed to get my opponent to agree to higher stakes than he was comfortable playing for. I wanted their ass puckered so tight you couldn't pound a flax seed up it. The tighter they were wound, I figured, the worse they would play.
Gamblers do win, and some can win for a period of time. Almost every one of them, however, eventually will lose.
You have to hold people accountable in this game. If beards got a sense that you were not atop your game, they would steal from you every chance they could.
From a pure financial standpoint, Desert Pines was one of my worst-performing investments. But it still stands as one of my proudest accomplishments.
I want to say up front: I'm sharing details about my system. Your model can be what you want it to be. But there are bedrock principles of sports wagering that are important to know regardless of the specific system you use or the size of your wagers.
You generally must pay an additional 10 percent to make the bet. So a $100 wager will cost you $110. This is called the "juice" or the "vig", from the Russian/Yiddish word vigorish. Because you have to pay that extra $10, it means you'll need to win 52.38 percent of the time to break even.
Being a good handicapper is, of course, essential to being a winning sports bettor.
Handicapping alone won't guarantee maximum success. It's only a part of my three-pronged plan; betting strategy and money management also are essential.
Ideally, you should not risk any more than 1 to 3 percent of your bankroll on any single bet.
Just being one of the guys came naturally to me. That's the way Grandmother raised me. It was "Yes sir" and "No sir" to guards and officials alike. Whatever street cred I earned on the inside was due to keeping my eyes open and my mouth shut. I waited my turn and didn't stand out. At the same time, I never backed down. In the end, I was just another con.
Bootstrappers share common traits, among them discipline, focus, and the ability to bounce back from failure.
Prison makes that course correction in your life. It puts everything in perspective, reminding you of the many things you otherwise took for granted and the things that actually matter.
As it stands today, prisons are breeding grounds for generations of criminals. Fathers and mothers who come out of prison with no hope cannot offer hope to their children. But those who learn trades and support their families are far more likely to raise children who have a greater vision for their lives.

Notes & Quotes: Citizen Outlaw by Charles Barber

The following are my favorite quotes from Charles Barber's Citizen Outlaw: One Man's Journey from Gangleader to Peacekeeper:

At age seven, [William] Outlaw so much admired one of the officers, a strapping man who would go on to become New Haven's first African-American police commissioner, that he wanted to become a policeman. But by age ten, Outlaw had seen the behavior of other officers, who took bribes and slept with the single moms, and he grew to hate everything about the New Haven police department.
At the heart of his story is an unrelenting paradox. It is a story of doing unremitting damage and then trying to undo that damage, which of course is not actually possible. But these days Outlaw relentlessly spends his hours undertaking the insurmountable task of trying to overturn what has already been done.
Even at his young age, Outlaw sensed that his father's rage was somehow misplaced. Sure, Outlaw had done something wrong; sometimes Outlaw himself believed he deserved punishment. But he could feel in his heart that there was no love behind his father's so-called discipline.
The framers of the public housing movement made a critical error as they conceived of their master plan: they prohibited tenants from owning their apartments, and therefore residents had little personal investment in the properties in which they lived. The buildings were owned by city authorities and often poorly maintained. The projects were frequently opened with great optimism and fanfare, but then quickly fell apart. And just as often, in creating the new projects, entire neighborhoods--many of them containing handsome historical structures alongside the squalid tenements--were razed. These processes created deep-seated feelings of dislocation and alienation among long-standing residents. In New Haven alone, 20 percent of the population was forced to move out of their homes between 1956 and 1974, all in the name of purported urban renewal and progress.
Research shows that gangs thrive in areas of wide income disparity, and Connecticut had among the highest income disparity in the United States.
Outlaw perfected this style of business in the gang's first two years, all before his sixteenth birthday. It powered the Jungle Boys into becoming the largest gang in New Haven, and made Outlaw a local celebrity wherever he went.
Just as he arrived, an explosive element came along that changed the New Haven--and American--drug scene forever. Cocaine.
A few weeks after [Len Bias's] death, both Republicans and Democrats forged the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which fundamentally transformed the law enforcement community's response to drug abuse from a rehabilitative approach to a punitive one. Soon afterward came further legislation, which called for new prisons and mandatory minimum sentences for drug violations. The new laws made punishments related to crack up to a hundredfold higher than for cocaine. Nancy Reagan, who led an anti-drug campaign from the White House, deemed the legislation a personal victory.
By the 1960s and 1070s, amid rising crime and high rates of criminal recidivism (nationally, about half of inmates released from prison were incarcerated again within three years), the Bureau of Prisons largely abandoned any interest in rehabilitation, replacing that ideal with the liberal use of solitary confinement and lockdowns.
The "Cure Violence" health model, originally developed by Dr. Gary Slutkin of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, identifies three principles employed to combat epidemics of disease and applies them to youth violence: 1. interrupt transmission of the disease; 2. reduce the risk of the highest-risk cases and; 3. change community norms.
In 2016, when a New Haven dealer was sent back to prison, he sold his cell phone to another dealer for $30,000. The contacts on his phone amounted to an instant book of business.
There was one thing that had not much changed upon Outlaw's return: the homicide rate. Twenty-two murders were perpetrated in New Haven in 2008; 12 in 2009; 23 in 2010, and an astonishing 34 in 2011, numbers that had not been seen since the 1980s. In 2010, not one of the murder victims in New Haven was white. 22 were black, and one was Hispanic. Twenty two of the 23 people killed were male. Between 2003 and 2015, among the 1225 victims of gunshot wounds treated at Yale New Haven Hospital, 84 percent were either black or Hispanic, and 93 percent were male. The statistics mirrored national numbers: black men comprise 6 percent of the United States population but half of all homicide victims. Five thousand black men perish in gunfire annually.

Notes & Quotes: Setting the Table by Danny Meyer

The following are my favorite notes from Danny Meyer's Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.

Within moments of being born, most babies find themselves receiving the first four gifts of life: eye contact, a smile, a hug, and some food. We receive many other gifts in a lifetime, but few can ever surpass those first four.
I've learned how crucially important it is to put hospitality to work, first for the people who work for me and subsequently for all the other people and stakeholders who are in any way affected by our business--in descending order, our guests, community, suppliers, and investors. I call this way of setting priorities "enlightened hospitality."
You may think, as I once did, that I'm primarily in the business of serving good food. Actually, though, food is secondary to something that matters even more. In the end, what's most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple, and it's that hard.
My discoveries have also convinced me that there's always someone out there who has figured out how to make something taste just a little bit better. And I am inspired by both the search and the discovery.
Hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. The converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions--for and to--express it all.
I was judged not just for the food, but by how well I cleaned the pans and plates, put out the fire, refilled the pit, and--most important--by whether I would be able to "leave the campsite neater than I had found it." (That concept remains, for me, one of the most significant measures of success in business, and in life.)
Learning to manage volunteers--to whom, absent a paycheck, ideas and ideals were the only currency--taught me to view all employees essentially as volunteers. Today, even with compensation as a motivator, I know that anyone who works for my company chooses to do so because of what we stand for. I believe that anyone who is qualified for a job in our company is also qualified for many other jobs at the same pay scale. It's up to us to provide solid reasons for our employees to want to work for us, over and beyond their compensation.
The beautiful choreography of service is, at its best, an art form, a ballet. I appreciate the grace with which a table can be properly cleared. I admire the elegance with which a bottle of wine can be appropriately opened, decanted, and poured. There's aesthetic value in doing things the right way. But I respond best when the person doing those things realizes that the purpose of all this beauty at the table is to create pleasure for me. To go through the motions in a perfunctory or self-absorbed manner, no matter how expertly rendered, diminishes the beauty. It's about soul--and service without soul, no matter how elegant, is quickly forgotten by the guest.
To this day, Union Square Cafe remains the purest expression of me and most clearly represents the mission of all my restaurants: to express excellence in the most inclusive, accessible, genuine, and hospitable way possible.
It's human nature for people to take precisely as much interest in you as they believe you're taking in them. There is no stronger way to build relationships than taking a genuine interest in other human beings and allowing them to share their stories. When we take an active interest in the guests at our restaurants, we create a sense of community and a feeling of "shared ownership."
I urge our managers to ABCD--always be collecting dots. Dots are information. The more information you collect, the more frequently you can make meaningful connections that can make other people feel good and give you an edge in business.
I realize that I don't have to do this kind of thing, but there is simply no point for me--or anyone on my staff--to work hard every day for the purpose of offering guests an average experience.
Our job is not to impose our own needs on our guests: it's to be aware of their needs and to deliver the goods accordingly. In hospitality, one size fits one!
I will throw myself into a new venture only when certain criteria are met: I am passionate about the subject matter (i.e., early American folk antiques, modern art, jazz, barbecue). I know I will derive some combination of challenge, satisfaction, and pleasure from the venture. It presents meaningful opportunities for professional growth for my colleagues and me. The new business will add something to the dialogue in a specific context, such a luxury dining (Gramercy Tavern), museum dining (The Modern, Cafe 2, and Terrace 5 at the Museum of Modern Art), Indian dining (Tabla), barbecue (Blue Smoke), or burgers and frozen custard (Shake Shack). Financial projections indicate the possibility of sufficient profit and returns on our investment to warrant the risk we're undertaking.
Know Thyself: Before you go to market, know what you are selling and to whom. It's a very rare business that can (or should) be all things to all people. Be the best you can be within a reasonably tight product focus. That will help you to improve yourself and help your customers to know how and when to buy your product.
The company learned to superimpose its blueprint onto thousands of locations north, south, east, and west, while also conveying the sense that each Starbucks belonged to its particular community. It was brilliant entrepreneurship to grasp that selling excellent coffee is secondary to creating a sense of community. Coffee sells (and is habit-forming), but performing a daily ritual with a self-selected group of life-minded human beings also sells. A business that doesn't understand it's raison d'etre as fostering community will inevitably underperform.
The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people. It's that simple, and it's that hard.
We searched high and low for the rare employees who love teaching, know how to set priorities, work with a sense of urgency, and--most important--are comfortable with holding people accountable to high standards while letting them hold onto their own dignity.
We don't believe in pursuing the so-called 110 percent employee. That's about as realistic as working achieve the twenty-six-hour day. We are hoping to develop 100 percent employees whose skills are divided 51-49 between emotional hospitality and technical excellence. We refer to these employees as 51 percenters.
To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. I've learned that we need to hire employees with these skills if we're to be champions at the team sport of hospitality. They are: Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full). Intelligence (not just "smarts" but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning). Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done). Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel). Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment).
When an employee does not work out, the problem more often stems from an attitude of "I won't" rather than "I can't".
It's pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It's the "whelming" candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that's the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can't get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they're comortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And because you either can't or don't fire them, you and they conspire to send a dangerous message to your staff and guests that "average" is acceptable.
It's critical to be a champion at retaining top staff members. A business owner can too easily squander the winning edge that comes from fielding a great team by not treating its members with respect and trust, teaching them new skills, and offering clear challenges.
I learned how critical it is to manage expectations--and to plan for success, not just for failure. Too often, we've made mistakes by not anticipating what the consequences would be if we were to win.
Previous success in any field invites high expectations and scrutiny the next time around. People are less forgiving when a winner falters than they are when an up-and-comer stumbles. But a mark of a champion is to welcome scrutiny, persevere, perform beyond expectations, and provide an exceptional product--for which forgiveness is not necessary.
I ended the memo by quoting something my late grandfather, Irving Harris, always used to remind me. "People will say a lot of great things about your business, and a lot of nasty things as well. Just remember: you're never as good as the best things they'll say, and never as bad as the negative ones. Just keep centered, know what you stand for, strive for new goals, and always be decent."
Three hallmarks of effective leadership are to provide a clear vision for your business so that your employees know where you're taking them; to hold people accountable for consistent standards of excellence; and to communicate a well-defined set of cultural priorities and nonnegotiable values. Perhaps most important, true leaders hold themselves accountable for conducting business in the same manner in which they've asked their team to perform.
Wherever your center lies, know it, name it, stick to it, and believe in it. Everyone who works with you will know what matters to you and will respect and appreciate your unwavering values. Your inner beliefs about business will guide you through the tough times. It's good to be open to fresh approaches to solving problems. But, when you cede your core values to someone else, it's time to quit.
Ultimately, the most successful business is not the one that eliminates the most problems. It's the one that becomes most expert at finding imaginative solutions to address those problems.
Poor communication is generally not a matter of miscommunication. More often, it involves taking away people's feeling of control. Change works only when people believe it is happening for them, not to them. And there's not much in between. Good communication is always a factor of good hospitality.
The biggest mistake managers can make is neglecting to set high standards and hold others accountable. This denies employees the chance to learn and excel. Employees do not want to be told, "Let me make your life easier by enabling you not to learn and not to achieve anything new."
You can get the best productivity from your employees when they believe that their leadership is open-minded, is accessible, and welcomes input.
You cannot be a great leader unless a critical mass of people are attracted to following your lead.
A great leader must repeatedly ask himself or herself this tough question: "Why would anyone want to be led by me?" And there had better be a good number of compelling reasons.
For some reason, when certain people gain more authority and power, they tend to demand respect from those who work for them. But what got them their promotion in the first place was their natural ability to command respect. Demanding respect creates tension that can make it very tough to lead, and very uncomfortable to follow.
Stanley [Marcus] set his martini down, looked me in the eye, and said, "So you made a mistake. You need to understand something important. And listen to me carefully: The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled."
The best companies are those that distinguish themselves by solving problems most effectively.
I like to think of our staff members not at servers, but surfers. Surfing is an arduous sport, and no one pursues it involuntarily. No one forces you to become a surfer, but if you choose to do it, there's no point in wasting energy trying to tame the ocean of its waves. Waves are like mistakes. You can count on the fact that there will always be another wave, so your choice is to get back on the surfboard and anticipate it. The degree to which you ride it with better form than the next guy is how you improve and distinguish yourself.
The Five A's for Effectively Addressing Mistakes:

Awareness
Acknowledgement
Apology
Action
Additional generosity

There are five primary stakeholders to whom we express our most caring hospitality, and in whom we take the greatest interest. Prioritizing those people in the following order is the guiding principle for practically every decision we make, and it has made the single greatest contribution to the ongoing success of our company. Our employees. Our guests. Our community. Our suppliers. Our investors.
Mutual respect and trust are the most powerful tools for building an energetic, motivated, winning team in any field.
Hospitality starts with the genuine enjoyment of doing something well for the purpose of bringing pleasure to other people.
I have always believed that you can tell as much about a company by the deals it does not make as by those it does. Much of the success we have had has resulted from saying "no, thank you" to opportunities that, while initially compelling, would not have been wise to pursue.
The "Yes" Criteria for New Ventures:

The opportunity fits and enhances our company's overall strategic goals and objectives.
The opportunity represents a chance to create a business venture that is perceived as groundbreaking, trailblazing, and fresh.
The timing is right for our company's capacity to grow with excellence, especially in terms of our having enough key employees who are themselves interested and ready to grow.
We believe we have the capacity to be category leaders within whatever niche we are pursuing.
We believe our existing businesses will benefit and improve by virtue of or notwithstanding our pursuing this new opportunity.
We feel excited and passionate about this idea. Pursuing it will be an opportunity to learn, grow, and have fun!
We are excited about doing business in this community.
The context is the right fit. Our restaurant and our style of doing business will be in harmony with its location.
An in-depth pro forma analysis convinces us that it a wise and safe investment.

As my company's leader, I have certainly learned to be decisive with an appropriate sense of urgency, but I always prefer to make my decisions after first building consensus among various colleagues, whose unique vantage points give me further confidence to move forward. This process can be lengthy, but so long as the spirit of any decision is consistent with what I'd want, bringing others' views to the table allows us to move forward with a more fully realized plan supported by those who are responsible for its execution. Our decision-making about whether or not to pursue new deals is always sharpest when I call on members of my advisory board to advocate on behalf of their primary role in our company.
At about this time, my assistant, Jenny Dirksen (now our director of community investment), shared a priceless expression her grandmother had taught her: One tuchas can't dance at two weddings. It's nice to be invited to a lot of parties. But as much as you may want to attend them all, it's important to acknowledge that you can be in only one place at a time, and do one thing well. My grandfather used to express similar wisdom: Doing two things like a half-wit never equals one thing like a whole wit.

Notes & Quotes: One Blade of Grass by Henry Shukman

The following are my favorite quotes from Henry Shukman's One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir.

My gaze fixed on the wall in front of me--a wall of adobe, glowing in the light of a lamp. An intense love for the wall welled up, almost as if I were falling in love with it, and it with me. All of a sudden, with what felt like a seismic jolt, the room seemed to blow wide open, the whole scene became an infinitely broad expanse, and it was as if I was sucked into that expanse myself and became part of it, so that the desert hills outside, which reached down to Gallup, in the valley two miles away, and on beyond, were my very own body.
It was true, as the Buddhists said: I was one with the world. I was one with everything. The whole world was my body, my mind. And because of that, I was beloved, I belonged, I was healed in all possible ways. All had been well, secretly well, all along.
Speedy didn't have a home, or a kitchen, or a bedroom. He basically just had himself, that was all. That and the land. He was at home anywhere. He was his home.
I had thought I wanted to go out and see the world. Instead it was the other way around: the world opened its arms and pulled me in.
This is a story not only of awakening but of healing. Perhaps the two can't, or shouldn't, be separated. No healing without a wound.
Help is always at hand. We just may not know where to look for it.
The change of location, the new job, the therapy, the publishers, quitting the PhD: they had all happened once I took up meditation. Was it possible that just sitting still twice a day could bring order to a disordered psychophysiology, and regulate a dysregulated life?
I had a diagnosis now: dysthymia. Persistent, low-grade, shame-based depression. It was tricky, because one of the symptoms was a denial of symptoms prompted by shame at they symptoms--the shame itself being one of the symptoms. Cleverly circular.
I began to do zazen daily. Over the weeks I grew to love it: a sense of clarity, a watery quality to everything, would come on.
How could it be that zazen--just sitting and watching one's breath--allowed all these old feelings to come up and work themselves out? Was it possible that all the human heart really needed was time? Give it time and it would sort itself out? You just had to be patient, allow it its period of grace each day.
He told me about the discipline of living as an artist, the need to practice your art every day without fail, how you should get up early each morning to work before you did anything else. You needed to trust your instincts and cultivate wonder.
Death unites us, love unites us, and grief unites us.
It was suddenly clear that all my life I had been assuming these many stimuli happened to a being called me. They were connected to one another by virtue of happening to me. But there was no thread connecting them. Each arose independently. They were free.
Without me, there was no past or future. Every phenomenon that arose was happening for the first and only time, and filled all awareness entirely. That made it an absolute treasure.
After any retreat, there was always a sense of having been cleansed, absolved even, and of returning to the world with new eyes.
I began to learn from other writers at the college. I had been so much my own man, I hadn't realized there were people willing to help. Perhaps the wisdom of Zen was creeping in bit by bit, touching the way I lived, not guarded but ready to give and receive help. One could feel goodwill toward just about everybody if one wanted.
This is part of Zen training. There is the sudden side--the unbidden revelation of the nature of self and world--and the gradual: the soil prepared through long cultivation.
I saw that meditation was not just meditation. It was a means, a vessel, a vehicle. Through daily sitting, through going on periodic sesshins at Cold Ash, a retreat center on the Berkshire Downs where three dozen of us would sit with John for a week, it was possible to undergo much more than a calming of the nervous system. In meditation we could pursue the fundamental investigation of a lifetime: the search for our identity.
I was slowly beginning to understand that Zen wasn't just about meditative absorption and insight, nor was it something done alone. It was about activity, about how you lived and interacted, how you treated others. It wasn't enough to "be enlightened," whatever that might mean; what counted was living it.
If Zen training is a kind of parenting, we are being stripped down more than built up, shown how little we need, not how much.
Could anything matter more than the present moment? Somehow that was where life itself was always waiting to meet me, if only I could remember.
My existence was a gift, and its unspeakable generosity had been hidden from me, by nothing but a mirage of grasping and aversion, by a basic ignorance that consisted in taking a mirage as real.
Zen may undermine false assumptions, but its goal is to help us live more helpfully--not in servitude to an imaginary tyrant called "me," but in the service of others.
Nothing matters more than finding that our "real self" is absolutely inclusive. And learning how to live it is the journey of a lifetime.
This was what Zen existed for: to bring a human being to a condition that, impossibly, resolved everything. And to pass it on.
The further you go in Zen the less you understand. That's how it is. You end up feeling a bit like Socrates, who said he knew only one thing, namely that he knew nothing. Although in Zen you don't even know that.
Zen: the only way to keep it is to give it away.
In the end it's all a fairy tale. In the end, all Zen saves us from is ourselves. It may be a little inaccurate but not unreasonable to say that in the end, all Zen is is love.
To bow to circumstance, not to set oneself up in any way, is crucial if we are to have any chance of receiving the liberative beauty of the teaching and passing it on.
Zen is soteriological. It therefore must be conceded to have an agenda of sorts. It seeks in some ways to "save" us, if only by relieving us of the baggage of our assumptions and preconceptions. But it saves us not from malign superhuman forces, nor into the arms of a heavenly being, but simply from ourselves. Its tagline might be: "How to get saved from yourself." It seeks to free us rom a mistaken perspective generated by a misunderstanding about our sense of self: namely, that it's a thing, that me is a fixed entity. On the other hand, it doesn't seek to replace wrong views with right ones. Rather, it seeks to free us of all views.

Notes & Quotes: A Bold Return to Giving a Damn by Will Harris

The following are my favorite quotes from Will Harris's A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food.

Reasonable people can probably agree that the way our food system has evolved--into one based on mass-produced industrial inputs; monocultures of foods that nobody, not even animals, should gorge on, unspeakable conditions for animals and undignified conditions for animals and undignified conditions for humans, and corporate monopolies controlling almost every link the chain--ain't working too good.
At White Oak Pastures, what fuels us is an attitude we call "a bold return to giving a damn."
I made myself a set of commandments about what I will do. I will treat the animals that I husband with respect and dignity, providing them with an environment that allows them to express their instinctive behavior. I will study the cycles of nature and learn how to not obstruct them. I will implement practices that leave the soil, water, and air better than I found it. I will heal the damage that my family's previous farming practices have inflicted on the land that I tend. I will provide a comfortable and wholesome life for my family. (This includes my biological family and the many at White Oak Pastures that I have come to accept as family.) I will provide the abundance that our land and herds produce to nourish those who need and appreciate it. I will nurture the village that we live in. I will get off my ass, seven days a week, and work as hard as I can, and invest all that I have to make all of this happen. I will openly teach what I have learned about these things to those who want to know.
I rethought things and now have a farm that's a living system that follows nature's principles. This system, based on holistic land management and owning every step of the supply chain from field to fork, retains the value of everything it creates and regenerates rather than degenerates the land it occupies, and it has helped my farm become one of the largest pasture-raised livestock operations in the country. We've evolved backward in a way, going all-in on the des: de-industrializing, de-commoditizing, and de-centralizing agriculture.
Though anybody that is worth a damn has a church, in my opinion, it's not necessarily in the form of a chapel, or synagogue, or mosque. Oftentimes, it's very different from that--it's a passion that they are fiercely devoted to, that is freely given for the benefit of others.
Everything I was spending so much time and money on was actually just a symptom of deeper problems I was inadvertently creating by my farming practices. And you seldom solve problems by attacking the surface while ignoring the root causes.
If you just sit still and shut up and pay attention, nature will tell you everything you need to know. She will provide you with everything you need to make your farm work. Nature knows everything, forgets nothing, and bats last.
I zoned in on what was really going on with my cattle and my pastures as I never had before. When I looked more closely, with a little less of the bravado and bluster that had driven me until then, I saw that all the things I'd been doing to pull more productivity and more success from my farm were destroying the basic operating principles of nature.
Cultivating food using the modern industrial system is like pissing your pants to stay warm. It's okay in the very short term but a terrible strategy for the long term.
At some point, you figure out what actions you are taking that are doing your land and animals harm, so you quit doing them. You suffer the withdrawal pains of giving them up for a while, then you start using the tools available to you to try to make the conditions around you a little better. And when what you do the first time doesn't work, you make a new plan and try that one instead. One step at a time, by planning, implementing, failing, and replanning and reimplementing over again, you start to figure out how to fix your farm.
We are truly the most destructive species that has ever resided on this magnificent planet.
Presented with the same systemic problem, the soil biologist will diagnose that the bacteria-to-fungi ratio is off; the plant geneticist says the genetics are awry; the livestock specialist says I should purchase the seed stock they've got on offer; and give different people give five different solutions based on their discipline. None of them are thinking of the farm as a complex organism in which every part is interconnected and influencing the next. They're watching the whole ball game through a sliver of missing plank in the fence. I get why that is--our land grant agricultural colleges have been teaching this approach for decades. But I think when you get focused on your silo of knowledge, you learn more and more about less and less until you know all there is to know about almost nothing.
Instead of scanning for what's wrong out there on my farm and in my fields, I'm looking for what's right. I'm looking for the biological activity that I can support and will maximize production, instead of killing biological competition to try and reach the same goal.
Somehow, my craziest ideas have had a way of actually working out. My dad used to say, "Will, I do believe you could shit in a swinging bucket." I have done the business equivalent of that a number of times.
These folks had never been told that what they thought they were buying when they picked up "USDA-inspected" supermarket beef--an all-American, small-town product steeped in feel-good special sauce--was no such thing. No wonder they were confused. The beef industry doesn't exactly label its product as "confinement-raised, pesticide-laden, soy-bean-finished beef." It had never occurred to them that there were hidden costs to the cheap meat they enjoyed, and that the cruelest of these costs were heaped onto the animals themselves.
Authenticity is the deal. Folks recognize it when they see it. So they listened.
When you see a living creature as a product, when you produce meat instead of raise meat, and when your holy grail is efficiency, you can rationalize a lot of sins.
As a consumer, you rub right up against this when you shop for food in your local store. A budget-cost pork loin or bargain-priced skirt steak, wrapped and ready to toss in your shopping cart for dinner, can make even the most miserable meat appear pretty good. I have compassion for that--when you don't know where that meat came from, why wouldn't the price tag be the main thing you consider? But I can't help but think, if you could taste the suffering in that underpriced meat, you might not want to eat it at all.
It's pretty simple: cows were born to roam and graze; chickens were born to scratch and peck; hogs were born to wallow and root. Deny them that right, and you have poor animal welfare.
Think about it: through confining animals and restricting their natural movement and exploration and socialization, we've inflicted on them the level of punishment that in human society we would inflict only on those who had committed terrible crimes. But somehow it's a perfectly accepted way of raising livestock.
I believe that if I want to take full responsibility for the welfare of my animals, I must also be responsible for where and how they die.
Nothing that dies stays dead. It goes on to provide nutrition for another living thing. From death springs decay. From decay springs new birth, and then growth, and then death again. This is how nature works. I feel better about my own death when I think about it this way.
I think the animals that we dispatch suffer less than almost any animal raised for food today. I've seen a lot of animals die in nature, too, and I think the animals we dispatch suffer less than the animals killed by predators. The fish grabbed by the spike-taloned ospreys from my pond, the rabbit mauled by a coyote--those creatures suffer, too.
Improving the welfare of farm animals falls on a different group of people: the consumer. You. Do you care enough about the animals that provide you with nourishment to go out of your way to look deeper? If you don't, then carry on buying the cheap, factory-farmed meat. But if it does matter to you, even just a little bit, then you've got to find and support a different kind of farm.
I stopped paying for pesticides, chemical fertilizers, hormone implants, subtherapeutic antibiotics, and the like, and instead I started paying for local labor. The labor builds the community. Instead of my money going to Wall Street and Silicon Valley and wherever else the entities behind industrial ag may be today, the money stays right here in the poorest county in America.
Our employees make nearly twice the county average, and they get benefits and health insurance. I believe you have to pay people fairly, because one thing I've learned is that a dog that is so hungry he's hunting food for himself is not going to hunt for you. I also believe in compensating people fairly for their skill sets, which is why some of my employees make more than me. I think when the founder or owner works shoulder to shoulder with the skill set provider, he or she appreciates those contributions a helluva lot more than when they're worlds away from those providers, trying to run the operation from a stock company boardroom. Another reason I hate big companies.
If you seek out nutritious food to build up your kids' health and your own, but if what you're buying leaves a trail of degradation on the people and towns that work so hard to produce it, or even wipes out the towns entirely, can you really call it "healthy"? That opens a can of worms.
If you're not willing to take risks in your farming operation, then you're gonna follow the path laid out before you by someone else with their agenda--and that's never gonna be the best path for you. It's gonna be what's best for them.
I have always taught my children that the God that I worship is generous, but relentless. He--or she--gives us opportunities, but when he does, he expects us to make them work. God wants to see you push the ball as far down the field as you can before he gives you the next one. So I've learned to milk the shit out of every opportunity I've been given. My God makes you prove you are worth it, every step of the way.
Closing loops means meeting your farm's needs by using the resources already available to you instead of depending on outside providers to supply them. It also means keeping as much as you can inside your system, like using waste materials to support the life cycle on the farm--not tossing them out for other entities to deal with--just as my ancestors did two, three, and four generations ago.
Any time a part of your business is out of your full control, you've got a vulnerability.
The entities making the most money are not interested in letting the truth about the harms they are well aware of, nor the benefits of alternatives like us, be known. They have big platforms and loud voices and myriad ways to ensure they dominate the conversation. But if we don't try to remedy this, we'll be stuck with a system that rewards and incentivizes the wrong things in the ceaseless quest to make ever more abhorrently cheap food.
When you put yourself in a position in which there ain't but one way out, you are free to quit worrying about future decision-making. You also change your idea of what winning even is.
I've come to understand that meaningful change will result not from tidal waves but from bubbles--individual examples of independent and resilient food systems dotting the rural fabric of our country.
Natural systems evolved to have redundancies built in so if one part of the system gets compromised, another part catches the slack. We need to be thinking about how to set up our small food systems to run the same way.
Are you willing to rip the curtain back and see the impact of your food choices? Can you look at it and still continue to empower these destructive forces?
If you want to make a difference, see a difference, or feel a difference, does it make any sense that you can continue to operate in the same way you always have? Do it different. Get out of the armchair, get out on the land. Touch the dirt. Connect.

Notes & Quotes: Lucky Me by Rich Paul

The following are my favorite quotes from Rich Paul's Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds.

Smart gamblers know how to manage the risks, move with intention and integrity, control what they control--and in the end, they have the heart to let the dice fall where they may.
Crack was so powerful it decimated my mother's love and expedited my adolescence. I had to grow from a cub to a young wolf right away.
From my post behind the counter, I observed that selling lots of food, beer, and cigarettes was just the surface level of my father's success. The bedrock of the business was the way he treated all the people he interacted with and their exchange of respect, no matter their station in life or status. A lot of people in the neighborhood called him "The Godfather."
I define a hustler as someone who is never complacent, always thinking two steps ahead of everyone else. Someone who can manage the transitions. If things turn upside down, a hustler adapts to being upside down without missing a step. They never get stuck in a situation, and always understand what move to make in order to accomplish their goals.
As time went on, I realized that Dad did everything consciously. Nothing was accidental, impulsive, or emotional. He always moved with intention. He was a gambler who left nothing to chance.
It was a weird juxtaposition of being broke and, in my mind, thinking I was wealthy because I had fly clothes. That happens in the ghetto because we're cut off from the wider world, so we think we've reached the top when we're barely above water.
Attention to detail defines my life. When you practice doing little things the right way, it helps the big things fall into place.
Having a disciplined and thoughtful approach to your work day in and day out, especially when the work is difficult and risky, will determine your level of success.
Don't let anybody fool you into thinking Black neighborhoods are jacked up because we're irresponsible or criminally inclined or too lazy to work. We were systematically confined to certain areas that were then drained of wealth, jobs, and resources. In a lot of places, we still are.
My policy is: Don't feed the ego. The relationship I have with my guys is simple. You can call me anytime, I can call you anytime, and we can talk about whatever. But when you call me and it's a real situation, I will always give you what you need: the honest truth.
As much as you can try to help a drug user, as much as you think you can save them, addiction can be stronger than love.
This is one of the ways that Black people have survived in America. When the dangers unleashed by the system threaten to spin through our lives like a tornado, we do things a certain way--consciously, purposefully--to avoid being swept away. Ain't no stumbling your way through life. Black folks don't have enough margin of error for that. Most of us have no margin of error at all.
One reason a lot of people aren't successful is they're trying to control everything but what they can control. Putting energy into what somebody else said, spending all day on Instagram worried about what somebody else has, where they are, what they're doing, who they're doing it with. You don't control any of that, and meanwhile your life is as messy as they come. If you put that energy into what you control, it creates a better outcome.
"The hell you looking all crusty for?" Dad said. "This don't even look like you." "Aww, Mr. Paul, I'm just going through something right now," Duck said. "I don't care what you're going through. You always got to keep yourself presentable, because you never know when an opportunity will arrive. Now go clean yourself up."
You're not going to make me react to anything. If I could control myself when some kid called my mother a crack fiend, then I have no problem dealing with slander from haters and competitors trying to bring me down in business. And the best way to deal with it is to stay calm and think for a moment, so you have the distance to consider whether the slander is a real threat or should just be ignored. If you decide it is a threat: Counterattack on your own terms, in your own way, in your own time. Never respond on someone else's terms and timetable. Never react with your own first reflex in a moment of rage or embarrassment.
When you see your mother walk away holding tighter to some bills than she ever held on to you, it's hard to trust anyone after that.
When I'm winning, I have to bear down. That's the discipline I brought to it. If I beat you out of twenty-five hundred and you ain't got but a hundred left, bearing down to get that last hundred is a must. That's the difference between a gambler and a hustler.
I was affiliated with 117th and 125th, but when they had beef with other blocks and neighborhoods, I was carved out of the disputes because I treated everyone with respect. My principles didn't change based on where you were from, so I stayed solid across the town.
I always had an affinity for people who did things in a certain way, who moved with precision, integrity, and confidence. That was Jay[Z].
I wasn't going to leave the streets, but I was going to be as smart as I could be on them, so I strategized and observed. I thought about who to stay away from and who I could trust. I always try to see beyond the surface, to discern the character of people, judge their reliability. I honed that skill as much as I could because it was the only thing that could separate me from everyone else in the game, no matter how street-smart they were. I needed to be smarter. I wasn't going to quit, so I had to maximize my wits and intuition to survive. And just like Dad said, I needed to know where to draw the line.
The only business transactions that came even close to the level of business I'm at today were illegal--and working with them was a fast track to jail or the morgue. Working in high-stakes business like that as a kid prepared me to work with some of the people I encounter in legal business today, who will metaphorically cut your throat in a second. The other difference: On the block, you knew when the danger was coming. In the business world, it's harder to see who's trying to kill you.
I'm pretty sure there were several times that something hostile was coming my way on different blocks and some guys would intervene like, "Nah, Rich is my people." I could feel that energy as I moved around. A few guys probably didn't like me because of the things I had, but I didn't have any real enemies because I treated everyone with respect. It was almost like I was one of those young athletes who the hood protects because he has a future. If something was about to jump off, guys would say, "Yo, leave Rich alone. Go on, Kid, get up outta here."
For me, street life had become about gamesmanship and chasing the thrill of high-stakes competition. Winning felt addictive. But the thrill of victory could quickly be followed by an Uzi in your face. I started to wonder if that kind of winning was winning at all.
The time between Dad's death and his burial was a blur. Two thousand people showed up for the funeral at Greater Friendship. That's when the full impact and magnitude of his life hit me. Two thousand people, not for a politician or an athlete, but for a corner store owner who tried to help everyone he could.
The agent playbook says the more credentials you have, the better position you're in. I knew how much disrespect there was amongst agents and executives in the NBA for someone with my background, but I saw a huge opportunity in the fact that nobody else had my experiences. Experiences are just as important as credentials and whatever money you might have been born into. My experiences placed me in a great position to help others. This is what they don't teach in the traditional institutions, whether that's college or sports agencies--that academic training means nothing if you can't use it to distinguish yourself from your competition.
"Out the trunk" is a mentality that still fuels me to this day, and it comes from more than just selling jerseys. It's about chasing down every little opportunity, putting in extra effort, and doing whatever it takes to improve your position.
Let me say something about the concept of the underworld: It's very real, in an almost literal sense. My everyday activities took place in a world that most people never see. You and I might both be having a breakfast sandwich in a restaurant, but I'm there for a reason that has nothing to do with food. As you're eating, all you see is a young man enjoying his sandwich. You may notice that on the other side of the diner is another guy eating a sandwich. You may or may not notice that moments after I get up to go to the bathroom, he gets up and goes to the bathroom. You definitely don't see that in that bathroom, a transaction takes place. Both of us come out, finish our sandwiches, and leave. That's the underworld, invisible and right in front of your face.
The Black American experience resonates with so many people, so many lives. In an elevated way, the story of our struggles is the basic essence of the human struggle. Every person on this planet needs love, dignity, and purpose.
You can't rely on luck to make it. Rely on yourself, your effort, your talent, and the knowledge that the journey itself provides what you need to succeed.

Rich Paul's Rules:

Take Care of Your People.
Other People Are Your Business.
Leave Nothing to Chance.
Iron Your Clothes.
Discipline Your Approach.
Build an Ecosystem of Empathy.
Study Your Craft.
Move with Intention; Be Ready to Improvise.
Understand the Whole Show.
Focus Is Everything.
Never Submit to Your Surroundings.
Don't Sleep In.
Choose the Best of Everything.
Find Your Purpose.
Neutralize Your Anger.
Learn the Art of Bearing Down and Letting Up.
Cheating Will Get You Killed.
Transitions Require Decisions.
Your Worst Experience Can Be Your Best Credential.
Hang On Until You're Dealt a Winning Hand.
Be a Star in Your Role.
Have Faith--You're Built for More than You Can See.